Improve Website Speed and Page Performance

Google announced, beginning July 2018, not only will Desktop site loading speed be a ranking factor but also mobile search speed. However, Google’s search engine is still very concerned with the intent of the search query and its results, hence a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content. This article covers how to assess your website speed and page performance, as well as the tools to assist in fixing issues as they’re identified.

What can affect website speed?

Many factors may slow down the response of your server. These include:

Slow routing

Poor web hosting

Slow application logic

Increased traffic

Slow database queries

Libraries

Bloated webpages

CPU resource utilization

Memory starvation

Lack of caching

Inefficient code or SQL

Bottlenecks/Slow Server

TTFB (time to first byte)

High TTFB will often cause your page loads to be slow or at the very least increase the latency between page loads. You should check to see if your TTFB is a performance issue or not. Try to keep TTFB under 300 milliseconds, repeat visits/tests should be even lower.

Analyze these factors on your site and address any issues that may be contributing to slow performance and you’re well on your way to improving your overall site quality and potential ranking ability.

Tools that can help analyze website speed and page performance

Google suggests these resources that can be used to evaluate a page’s performance.Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditionsLighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pagesPageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations

I’ve personally used the Lighthouse and webpagetest.org resource frequently because I think these resources provide sufficient enough detail as to the site’s performance and how to approach its optimization.

How to Reduce Server Response Time

Server response time measures how long it takes to load the HTML needed to begin rendering the page from your server. If your server response time is slow, then your whole site will be slow, no matter how optimized your other resources are.

Note* There may be slight variance from one run to the next. A highly variable server response time may indicate an underlying performance issue. Typically you want your server response time to be below 200ms.